Experts blame Trump as blue collar jobs collapse

President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump participate in the annual ceremony to pardon the national Thanksgiving turkeys, Tuesday, November 25, 2025, in the White House Rose Garden. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)

Newsweek reports that blue collar jobs are collapsing under President Donald Trump as the labor market in 2025 "takes a decidedly white-collar tone" driven by artificial intelligence.

"AI has already been cited in many of the mass reductions announced by Amazon and other corporations in recent weeks," writes Hugh Cameron.

"But for all the hand-wringing over the potentially ill-fated employees of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, a quieter crisis appears to be unfolding for the U.S.'s blue-collar employees, despite the pledges and efforts of the current administration to foster a renaissance in marquee industries such as construction and manufacturing," he adds.

The delayed September jobs report corroborates this, showing "an encouraging uptick in overall hiring but no pause in blue-collar employment's long-term decline," Cameron writes.

Of the five areas of employment considered blue collar — manufacturing, mining and logging, transportation and warehousing, utilities, and construction — only construction saw an increase in employment, he notes.

That said, construction's 19,000-job gain was also "insufficient to offset the monthly loss of 25,300 jobs in transportation or manufacturing shedding a further 6,000," he writes.

"Year-over-year changes show that annual payroll declines have accelerated since January — albeit continuing a long-term trend—and have pushed blue-collar job growth into negative territory for the first time since the pandemic," Cameron explains.

Heidi Shierholz, chief economist for the Department of Labor during President Barack Obama's tenure, tells Newsweek there is "undeniably a deterioration in employment conditions for the U.S.'s blue-collar workers."

"Between April and September, goods-producing industries (manufacturing, construction, logging, mining), lost 72,000 jobs, with most of those losses (58,000) in manufacturing," she says.

Shierholz also says that "the services sector — which falls partially under the blue-collar umbrella — is 'limping along' thanks solely to gains in health care."

David Dorn, a labor market expert at the University of Zurich, says construction is particularly vulnerable to negative growth despite that slight uptick in employment.

"This sector is highly sensitive to broader economic deceleration, and increasingly restrictive immigration policies under the current U.S. administration are likely constraining labor supply," he says.

And while Dorn says it's hard to "isolate" the direct effects of Trump's tariffs on employment, he says he doubts "whether these had 'generated any sustained gains' in jobs."

Dean Baker, a co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, goes further and says "tariffs have been largely to blame for the uncertainty and 'overall weakness in demand' that has driven cautious hiring across blue-collar sectors," Newsweek reports.

"Companies are reluctant to invest in a context where they have no idea what tariffs will be in place six months from now, much less three to five years from now," he says.

Baker also says that while manufacturing's gradual decline as a share of total employment has "been the case for more than 50 years," as labor demand shifted toward health care, education and other roles within the more service-focused economy, the president isn't trying to fix it either.

"Trump is doing nothing to address these issues," Baker says.

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